: Re: Can the Hero's Journey be detrimental to the process of storywriting? When it comes to common writing advice, the Hero's Journey and Show, don't Tell, are the most common ones. The second one

@Kevin153

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Any writing tool can be helpful or harmful. Campbell's original work was descriptive, not prescriptive. He noted similarities in many of the world's most popular stories --it's only later that people began writing in conscious imitation of that. But imitating something --even something good --isn't always the best way to create something vital and new.
In my own writing, there was a time when I was heavily influenced by the Hero's Journey and its derivatives, such as Vogler's The Writer's Journey. But ultimately I found it too constricting, and not that helpful as a writing tool.
My best advice with using the Hero's Journey is to write without it, and then go back and see if there are places where something from the model would be helpful --"Hey, I could use a Night Sea Journey" or "My character needs a mentor."

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